Carol Silva is no stranger to parades. The longtime News 12 Long Island anchor used to stand along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan with her Irish mother for many St. Patrick’s Day parades while growing up in Hicksville. As a mother she’s participated as a Girl Scout leader and soccer coach. She even took part in a homecoming parade for gold medal figure skater Sarah Hughes in Great Neck after her 2002 Winter Olympics win.

Fresh from the “I Worked on Wall Street But It Left Me Unfulfilled” file, meet Ian Linde, late of the $40 billion Jeffries Group and a successful equity trader with Lehman Brothers-Barclays before that.

The state’s Start-Up NY program may be a bit of a dud, but that hasn’t slowed the pace of other university-based programs that seek to support and commercialize innovation from students, staff and the region’s sundry entrepreneurs.

Bluetooth beacons — small nightlight-sized devices that can communicate with a mobile app as shoppers move throughout a store — may have the same potential for bank branches as they do for mega-retailers like Target Corp.

Long Island Lutheran High School kickline coach Melissa Essigman hangs out with her team members during the Long Island Kickline Association competition at Uniondale High School on Feb. 7, 2016. (Photo: Joseph Kellard)

Melissa Essigman’s dance background is exclusively in ballet. Yet the first-year head coach of Long Island Lutheran High School’s varsity kickline team is starting to make waves in the world of hip-hop.

Less than a year ago, Anissa Moore was preparing for spring break, ready to hop on a JetBlue flight to take her far from Nassau Community College, where she has been a communications professor for the past 19 years.

Sightings of Darth Vader-clad moviegoers are expected when “The Force Awakens,” the seventh in the “Star Wars” saga of movies, opens Friday at more than 4,100 theaters across the nation, including Long Beach Cinema 4.

Bill Murphy, who built and maintained a September 11 memorial on Oceanview yards from his California Street home, noticed early Saturday that the metal frame that holds a flagpole was torn from the memorial’s base and thrown in the street.

Some Babylon residents are concerned that a soup kitchen may open at a local church. Kevin Cruz, senior warden at Christ Episcopal Church, proposes to open a food program to feed between 30 to 50 people a week, and the village’s Zoning Board of Appeals is considering the proposal.